Mindshare Wins MediaPost’s Media Agency of the Year for Third Time in Four Years

MediaPost awarded Mindshare, the global media agency network that is part of WPP, one of its highest honors for the third time in four years: Media Agency of the Year.

In its annual Agency of the Year awards, MediaPost honors the best in class of the advertising industry, celebrating companies that demonstrate the strongest vision, innovation, and industry leadership. And Mindshare’s vision of Good Growth—growth that is diversified, enduring, and sustainable, delivering positive outcomes for stakeholders—has spurred an award-winning run of industry innovations that help shape both their client work and society for the better.

In addition to Mindshare’s win, GroupM also won MediaPost’s Media Agency Holding Company of the Year award for the second consecutive year.

MediaPost profiled Mindshare in an in-depth article, and honored the agency at an awards ceremony on January 25 in New York. You can read part of the Mindshare feature below. And, check out the feature piece on GroupM’s win here.

Excerpt:  So it is noteworthy that the organizations unveiled their effort for the first time in a presentation by Mindshare Chief Global Chief Transformation Officer Ollie Joyce at the Cannes Lions Festival, but followed up with a big push by GroupM to organize the industry around it.

It should be a powerful example for other agency organizations of how their total organizations can work together, share credit -- and importantly, also take individual credit for innovating the marketplace.

“We believe in strong agency brands, and we believe they are stronger together,” says Mindshare North America CEO Amanda Richman, adding: “We've worked out how to create distinct cultures, but cultures that also thrive on collaboration.”

Importantly, she says there is another key benefit beyond the publicly visible ones -- which is that it helps Mindshare attract and retain talent that might not be as interested in agency cultures where people cannot take credit, or where there is less collaborative “mobility” across agencies.

She says it is routine for GroupM shops to recruit talent from one another in a way that grows both organizations, but most importantly, advances the individuals doing it.

Richman should know. Before joining Mindshare she was U.S. CEO of Wavemaker, which was MediaPost's media agency of the year in 2021.

She says the guiding principle underlying this collaborative spirit is a Mindshare mantra of “good growth” that pervades every aspect of the organization, as well as the stakeholders it works with or for: clients, suppliers and consumers.

It's a principle that governs everything Mindshare does, including several of the innovations that contributed to this year's win, including:

• Creating systems and tools that enable a more diverse and inclusive media marketplace (PMPs for Black, LatinX, and LGBTQ programmatic media buys), mitigate bias (collaborated with IBM on development of its AI Fairness 360 toolkit), and focus on people’s personal safety (Mindshare's “Impact Index”).
• Integrating brand and performance in media planning, buying and measurement (absorbed pure-play performance shop Neo into Mindshare, developed an integrated brand/performance model with Unilever, and invested heavily in systems and tools (unified analytics platform Synapse and neuromarketing research facility NeuroLab) that provide powerful, but simple proprietary insights contributing to competitive advantages.

“Good growth” is far more than Mindshare's internal mantra -- it is one that pervades its relationship with clients and vendors alike.

“Mindshare's commitment to a more inclusive retail media marketplace aligns perfectly with Kroger Precision Marketing's beliefs,” Kroger Precision Marketing Senior Vice President Cara Pratt says of the agency's expansion of its inclusive media marketplace commitment to the retail media category. “Together we're making progress for our shared clients and customers, as we support their Inclusion private marketplace series through our media capabilities.”